Brenda Dayne is in North America

First off, before Brenda.... Check out what Gale Zucker has been up to at the Arkansas Literary Festival and here.

Most of you knitters probably know about Cast-On, the always entertaining podcast for knitters. The lovely host of Cast-On - Brenda Dayne - is now on tour in North America. Here is a link to all her stops. Next week, Brenda will be in our very own Pioneer Valley at Webs for a series of classes and a speech called A Memorable Yarn.

Now if you aren't lucky to live in the area where Brenda is traveling, you can still participate in her tour. Brenda is doing a giant art installation called "A Memorable Yarn." Here's how she explains it on her blog:

"What is a memory? It is a set of encoded neural connections in the brain. It is also our ability to encode, store, retain and subsequently recall information and past experiences. Neurons firing in our brain are why we can knit, but it’s our memories of where we’ve been and what we’ve learned that make us knitters.

Join Brenda Dayne on a journey through synapses, brain wrinkles, actions, words, needles, and yarn as she explores these primal human connections in A Memorable Yarn. A collaborative, investigative storytelling and gallery event, A Memorable Yarn brings knitters, their work, and their memories into the spotlight.

Your participation is simple. Donate a few yards of a yarn that holds a certain memory – perhaps leftover from a meaningful project, a yarn personally hand-dyed or hand spun, or a souvenir yarn from a foreign adventure – and an hour or two of your time to knit a small Memory Bag as a physical recollection of that special yarn or project.

This small but intentional act will, in turn, create a new memory for you, as the knitter, and for Brenda, as the artist who will join these invisible strands and tangible objects into a single, powerful collection of personal history. Together, the Memory Bags will form a literal representation of hundreds of hours of labor, and create memory connections between knitters beyond their local social circles, bypassing age, gender, skill level, and socioeconomic status."

Download the pdf and join in her project. You will have to go almost to the bottom of the webpage for the download button. (Sorry, can't figure out how to link the pdf.) See all you locals next week at Webs.